Hall of Fame coach Jim Calhoun, who led Connecticut to three national championships, is expected to announce his retirement Thursday, according to multiple reports.

Calhoun, 70, won 873 games in 40 years as a head coach, first at Northeastern and the past 26 years at UConn. He put four teams in the Final Four, winning national titles in 1999, 2004 and 2011. He has struggled with health problems in recent years, missing games last season with back problems. He is recovering from a broken hip in a bicycling accident five weeks ago.

The Hartford Courant reached Calhoun on Wednesday evening. He would not confirm nor deny the reports, saying only: "We're having the discussions we need to have about moving forward. … Life is full of tough decisions."

A university source told The Courant that the official announcement will come at a 2 p.m. ET Thursday press conference.

Former UConn star and current assistant coach Kevin Ollie, who Calhoun has long pushed to be his successor, is expected to named coach, according to multiple reports. Ollie, 39, was a two-time captain of the Huskies who returned to the program as an assistant in 2010 after 13 years of playing in the NBA. Director of basketball operations Karl Hobbs, a former head coach at George Washington, will be promoted to take Ollie's former role as an assistant coach, according to The Courant. George Blaney and Glen Miller also are expected to remain on staff.

Calhoun’s agent is working out the details with the university, a source told NBC Connecticut. Another source said Calhoun wants to meet with Huskies players before making his decision official.

Calhoun, who was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2005, has been rehabilitating his broken hip. He has advanced from a walker to crutches, and hopes his doctor will upgrade him to cane-only status soon.

All throughout his painful rehab sessions at UConn, he has been thinking about his future. He said he has been waffling for weeks.

"Depends on how I feel sometimes," Calhoun told Sports Illustrated last week. "But I'm very close to knowing. I'm just going to wake up one morning, and I will know what is the right thing to do. I always said if I ever come here and say, 'Jeez I'm not sure, I will know it's time.'

"I could have walked away last year. But I walked off the stage (after winning the 2011 NCAA Tournament), there were 70,000 people and we had all those guys back. I couldn't do it. I thought we could do it again. We had the players. We had a team that won 53 games in two years. We've had 25 consecutive winning seasons. That's hard to do.”

Last season, however, was a struggle for Calhoun and the program. He was suspended three games because of recruiting violations and then missed eight games because of back problems. The team, despite losing 7-of-9 games early in Big East play, rallied to make the NCAA Tournament with a 20-13 record. It lost to Iowa State in the opening round.

This season could be an even greater struggle. The team lost Jeremy Lamb and Andre Drummond to the NBA and Alex Oriakhi (Missouri), Roscoe Smith (UNLV) and Michael Bradley (junior college) since the NCAA announced a one-year postseason ban for the program’s academic shortcomings.

Still, there is no doubt that Calhoun has left a big imprint on a program he took over in 1986.

"I want people to say, 'the five best programs in the history of basketball are North Carolina, Duke, Indiana, Kentucky and – they have a tough time saying it sometimes – Connecticut," he told The Courant just ahead of his 70th birthday last May. "We are one of those teams. I want that legacy very badly for UConn. The passion of the people here , there is always a very thin line between love and hate, depending on the day, the recruit kid who didn't play well as well as they thought. But the worse thing to have, as when I came here, was apathy."